Dreamlife

  I’m visiting an unfamiliar
city with MV; I marvel at her presence. (Why will my psyche vouchsafe
such a dream of her but not of the IQ?) We’re in an underground level
of a building when we decide to split up; I agree to phone her later to
meet up. I board the lift, ascend to ground level, exit and begin
walking. The landscape, however, is quite unlike a city: I’m walking
along an arcade between a continuous row of buildings and what appears
to be a boundless garden. Occasionally I pass what appear to be
entrances to subway stations, the only confirmation of the premise that
I’m in a city. At some points the corridors of the arcade are
enclosed–almost all light is blocked out and I become disoriented in
the darkness. Then I am no longer in the arcade but simply walking in
front of houses. In front of one of them is a gathering performing what
seems to be some kind of dance. They are distributed in small
groups–in one instance, a group of one, a woman who is the only one
who catches my attention. None of the groups seem to pay attention to
the others but they are well synchronized in spite of that. Their
motion seems simple and repetitive, rhythmically advancing and
retreating.
  Then, I’m in bed in a room
not my own, looking out the window at a darkening or brightening sky,
sunrise or sunset and think I should call MV. I choose the pseudonym
Charlie Skasz and then a voice says something (or I think a voice says
something) about a skeleton key unlocking things in my subconscious.

  In last night’s dream, I
walk into some kind of seminar room, large but not overly crowded. I
discover there is a guest speaker, the IQ. There is a saintly aura
about her, her voice is mellifluous, her demeanor gentle. Quite a
change from past dreams, not to mention waking life! I don’t recall
what she is talking about but the audience seems to regard her words as
authoritative. I realize she’s blind and is in some sense beyond strife
or whatever it is may have lain between us.

  In the most recent dream I
can still recall, I am living in a rather squalid flat in an
unidentified city. I walk out but something prompts me to return. Did I
forget something? I notice that people on the street around me are
walking rather unusually; their limbs are stiff, their movements slow
and jerky. My own motion also seems to me slower than I’d like and I
feel impatience but eventually get back to my flat. I have some doubts
about my ingress being possible–have I mislaid my keys?–but manage to
get in. Then, the landlord knocks on my door and comes in to discuss
something I don’t recall. I find his presence vaguely disagreeable but
that is not my principal response to him. There is a small animal in my
flat with me, although I don’t think it’s my pet, and I fear the
landlord may pose a threat to it. I am worried but not for myself.
  I will allow waking life a
rare intrusion into my dreamlog because I want to record details that
are important to my dreamlife. First, since May the 23rd, I have again
been suffering anguish over MV’s silence. I wonder if, in retrospect,
that will turn out to be significant? Second, I found on the internet
that the IQ will be teaching a course at her school during my visit
there. A reckoning lies ahead and hopefully a resolution.

  Two nights ago, I attend an orchestral performance. I think I’m
with my parents but soon become separated from them. I ascend to the
top row of the nosebleed seats but somehow seem not to be too far from
the stage. The musicians file onto the stage and take their seats.
However, before they play a single note, it becomes clear that
something is amiss: the stage has rotated at an angle that hides much
of the orchestra from the audience’s view. The lights dim and the
musicians exit. Then it is announced that the stage will be deployed to
the opposite end of the hall. Seats begin to rise where the stage was
and soon I am looking at a section of seats like a mirror image of
mine. I make my way across to the hall, over to the top row again. I
speak with someone there but don’t recall the content of the
conversation or who it is. The hall is rather sparsely peopled. I sit
down to wait for the stage and musicians to reappear. However, a long
time seems to go by without anything happening. The audience grows
impatient. There are now two sections of seats facing each other and
taking up the entire hall. At the end of my dream, I have descended
again and sit in the space between them.

  The forgotten images of a
dream dissolve before a black silhoutte that emerges from them, as if
this figure had walked through a movie screen and ruptured the
projections upon it. I don’t visualize myself in contact with this
shade, but begin to feel strong pressure bearing on different parts of
my body, which I know he/it is exercising. I curse it and tense my body
to resist.
  Then, I am in a warm, ample
apartment (I don’t  know if I live there or am visiting). I
receive a letter from my friend Miss T. When I open it, I find inside a
small vinyl record of Ormandy conducting the BPO in Brahms and marvel
that O. could ever play this well. There’s a window, or what appears to
be a window with heavy wooden shutters, in the apartment I go to more
than once. When I open it, however, it does not give a view of the
outside but simply shows a section of a bleak, spartan wall.
Nonetheless, from somewhere, gusts of icy wind blow through this
window. The wind carries a voice I listen to attentively, but whose
words I cannot recall.

  This dream is worth getting up at 5 a.m. to record it. I am in a
place of remote place of great natural beauty: the grass is lush and
the low-hanging trees are thick around me. I am walking near a road
with my teacher and we meet Dan C___sson and stop to talk to him. (Or
do I meet them separately?) We walk on and my teacher tells me that Dan
is taking a long time to write something foolish and predictable, I no
longer recall what.
   Then he opens up a book, something by an American author,
to show me a passage. Since I don’t understand it even in the dream and
since I have forgotten many of the words, I have no hope of extracting
meaning from it with my waking mind and record what little I recall
simply to remind myself of the deeply inspired feeling that accompanies
this dream. The passage begins with a girl giving a certain gift to a
fellow in the story, a hunter or dreamer. It ends with the admonition
“But from above and below, a lethe comes and takes…” (“Ether” would
make sense here but “lethe” is the word I seem to remember. My dreams
have words now.) My teacher asks me what this tells us about the
difference between the journals of the hunter and the hunted (perhaps
this wording is also part of the passage). I am at a loss, so he tells
me that it describes the ability of ____ to make x dollars but also to
make much less.

  Altering my schedule has induced me to neglect this dreamlog for
a while, so I want to record a couple of recent dreams before they fade.
  In one dream, that sounds but does not feel trivial, I am
standing on an island in the middle of a desolate avenue that resembles
but is not the same as the one that leads to my house in waking life.
The street is nearly empty of vehicles and passersby but a youth who
seems familiar comes by and suggests we go somewhere but I tell him I
am waiting for someone or something, so he moves on.
  I suppose I get tired of waiting, since I walk uphill toward the
houses opposite me. I go up a winding block and enter a house. In a
large room, some of the kids who frequent my gym in waking life are
standing around. I don’t have any sense whether I am their age or my
current one in the dream, but in any case, I join in their banter. On
the floor is a bench that curves upwards. I lie down on it and try to
flatten my body against its resistance.
  In the second dream, almost completely forgotten, I am at sea
traveling on a ship. A friend of mine is on the boat as well but I
never see her–we use cell phones or walkie talkies to relate to each
other our location and what we are doing. There are people aboard I do
interact with directly but I’ve forgotten the nature of those
interactions.
 

  In the first part of the
dream, I am an invisible observer. Someone who dwells on a very high
floor of a modern, sterile building is being manipulated by other
unseen observers. Among other things, he is induced to play the violin
in the style of another artist and to brainwash someone, even while
knowing that he himself has been brainwashed.
  Then I am in a laundromat, writing down my observations about
this experiment in mind control in a sink. Unfortunately, my text goes
down the drain. So I walk back over to my stack of laundry. I
experience some difficulty with this because the laundromat is bisected
by a road and I have to dodge a couple of swiftly moving motor
vehicles. When I get to my laundry pile, I find mixed in with my
clothes some vegetables of gaudy, unusual colours and uncommon size.

  I’m waiting with several
other people to be transported to parts unknown. A van  pulls up
with only the driver inside and I wonder for a moment how he can hope
to accommodate all of us who are waiting in that modest sized 
vehicle. But then cubic units, each large enough to hold a person,
begin to fold out of the van until the whole assemblage is the size of
a large truck and we begin to pile in, each passenger encased in his
own unit and head off to parts unknown.
  Then I arrive at a small
apartment to interview a young (late teens) Oriental girl. However,
there is a constant flow of heavy traffic on the street outside and the
din makes it difficult to speak. Since I can’t converse, I look for
something to occupy my attention and notice a comic book I then pick
up. On the back cover I find an updated version of the advertisement
that used to grace the back covers in my childhood, “The insult that
made a man out of Mac.” In this version, the threat that shadows the
beach is no longer an aggressive beach bum. Rather, it shows a shark
attempting to devour the beachgoer. But the beachgoer has been using
Charles Atlas’ system, so he strains his mighty thews against the roof
of the shark’s mouth and keeps it from closing. For some reason, this
makes me laugh so hard that I wake up.

  In this dream, William and I
are checking into a fleabag motel (not so unlike, come to think of it,
the “Grand” Marina we lodged in this summer) off a barren, nondescript
road. I leave my belongings in our room and head out. As I’m leaving,
the manager approaches me and tells me privately he has some misgivings
about William’s reasons for being there. I reassure him that William is
on the level and explain what his legitimate reasons are, although I no
longer remember them or the manager’s worry. Then I get into the jalopy
we’re traveling in and drive off.
  When I return, I notice
William has dumped a ragged suitcase of mine in a pile of rubbish in
the parking lot. Without looking inside, I somehow know that it
contains a cadaver we had with us in our ‘suite’. (I don’t recall whose
corpse it is or why on earth we have it. Synchronistically, I dreamt
this the night before going to see Claude Chabrol’s La Demoiselle d’honneur.)
I’m not sure what my motivation is but I pick up the suitcase and bring
it back indoors. Almost as soon as I enter, the manager begins banging
angrily on the door. I’m not sure what his grievance is–that we’re
keeping a corpse on the premises? I’m quite concerned however–not
about being arrested (which doesn’t cross my mind) but about being
evicted. As crummy and generic as this place looks, something must bind
me to it, since I feel such unease at the prospect of having to leave.